Lundum Dare 48 was a couple weeks ago and since I was aware of the jam from its promotion on pygame.org and I'm a python guy I wanted to make something in pygame. Come to find out, replit has a pygame enabled environment.<p>It's not very fast. It worked for some simple animations and a stupid little turn based colony building simulator but I dunno if it could handle something more arcade style.<p>I wouldn't call the IDE great. It's all on the web and subject to unsurprising latency. I ran into a couple of weird bugs.<p>But I spent zero time setting up my environment. Zero time building binaries. Zero time on cross platform testing. Publishing (to the jam) was literally pasting the link to the replit on my jam page. Everybody got my source code and a place to hack on it. That is pretty damn cool.<p>For the curious: <a href="https://replit.com/@BrianDavis7/A-Disguised-Far-Muse" rel="nofollow">https://replit.com/@BrianDavis7/A-Disguised-Far-Muse</a>
Maybe I'm just naive, but I find this insanely exciting. Particularly the analogy of Youtube vs TikTok. Having the source code right next to the executable, right there in your browser seems very powerful.<p>If it pans out right, the next gen of memes could be games like the ones showcased here, and then people "fork" it, and change some of the code and make it their own.<p>I have nothing to do with repl.it, just really happy to see this.
Is it another attempt to "make programming easy"?. I keep wondering if it's even possible. Can everyone be code literate? or do you have to have an "algorithmic" (for lack of a better word) way of thinking? Is it something like woodworking class vs real carpentry?<p>Minecraft, for example, opened a door to system thinking to a lot of young people, but there's probably many more that just like the fun and not the understanding and craft, so maybe those people's brain already leaned towards it?<p>Right now we're in peak "Everyone should know how to code" but sometimes it seems like we keep chasing the golden goose - Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, Node based programming, Webflow etc.<p>Edit: forgot to add that the CEO has that confident delusional/visionary vibe so this certainly fits the bill. Time will tell which it is.
This is really exciting. Feels like the start of something way bigger.<p>With an app store and server infrastructure with public ports, I could also see API/automation browsing built-in.<p>And hasn't nearly every strategy in the history of computing that started with gaming succeeded wildly?
Does replit have a really high cadence compared to most startups or am I surprised because I just see the occasional announcement and these things brew for a long time under the radar?
This looks neat to me, but I'm not really sure what advantage this distribution model offers over their current offerings. For one, every user is going to need some way to execute your arbitrary code, meaning most will need a sandbox at the very least, all the way up to a small dedicated VPS for beefier programs. Of course this begs the question, will there be a pricing model? Will certain languages be more expensive to run than others? Will some languages be outright omitted? Will each execution of the program also include compilation time?<p>Hats off to the repl team for making this work, but there's a lot of roadblocks ahead. I'm sure they have the immediate capital to make it work in the short-term, but I struggle to see how this would be a sustainable project...
Great, just great. There goes my morning tomorrow.<p>Seriously, I think this is an exciting idea. There are probably a fraction of a billion people who know how to code, even if not experts.<p>This reminds me of my granddaughter writing games with a game system from MIT (which I forget the name of) and sharing them with friends.
how does Replit Apps compare to Glitch? i feel like there are so many similar attempts to crack this nut and while the choice is nice, i remember being a little overwhelmed when i was starting out.